Microsoft 365 Launched – Good News for Small Business
It’s been in beta for a while but Office 365 has now launched and is fully operational. It comes at a low price point and offers a number of advantages to small businesses.
However before we start looking at features please remember one thing – if you choose the cloud only version of Office 365 then you can only work when connected to the Internet. It’s a vital point to remember and one that is at the root of everything to do with the cloud. If your staff work mostly on the road they will need to find a decent Internet connection to really get the most out of this.
So what can it do?
- Every person you put on Office 365 gets Exchange Email with all the advantages that brings. Including – robust and world class email features, calendar sharing, contact sharing and scheduling. At the price of Office 365 just using the email facility on its own is something of a bargain
- Online versions of Office applications. This is smart – you just log on and get familiar office applications. If you pay a little more you can also get the desktop based ones at a very reasonable price.
- Sharing! Office 365 allows for Sharepoint which makes for very easy sharing and managing of team and group documents.
- Create a website – its easy to create a public facing website using office 365 – so as well as a good cloud solution you also get cheap web site hosting.
- Run company databases. Access Services in Office 365 mean that you can create share data the way you need to in web based databases.
- Run online meetings and share desktops. This is something that is underused in business – but only at the moment. Once everyone in your organisation can easily meet online and look at what you are doing you will find that online meetings can be incredibly productive. I have a feeling that this will online meetings out of geek hands and involve a lot more people. It is far superior to having a conference call.
- Smartphone integration. Although this all works best via Windows Phone, you can share email, contacts and calendar to most smartphones. Most notably iPhone and Android
I don’t mean to make this piece sound like an advert and there are alternatives to Office 365. However nothing else I have seen brings so many Enterprise class features to the small business at such an affordable price point. My feeling is that this will be a service that become very important – as if used well and under the right conditions really bring down the costs of business computing for a lot companies. That is something that a lot of people have been looking for – for a long time.